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Ten Marks the Spot

February 11, 2006 by debbie T | Mac Corner

Are there still some that that pronounce Mac OS X literally as "Mac OS x" as opposed to "Mac OS 10" ?

I admit when I was first thinking about converting, I questioned the pronunciation and turned to google for my answer. Yep, the official way is TEN so why are there still some holdouts that insist on “x”?

http://forum.osx86project.org/lofiversion/index.php/t77-50.html
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-26996.html

It makes sense that the Roman numeral “X” was chosen to give the operating system a powerful presence. I have even heard mention that it also might refer to “x-windows”. But it is version 10 no matter how it looks in print.

A lot of others have since jumped on the X power bandwagon. Macromedia temporarily dropped numerical versions, and named their new product as “MX”. Corel has recently released Paint Shop Pro X(10) and Draw X3 (13).

When the next big Mac OS comes out, will it be named 11 or XI or something altogether different? I guess we won’t have to worry about that for a long time, since 10.5 is due later this year, and it will be a few years until we arrive at .9.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

There are 2 comments

  1. the X in OS X comes from neXtStep, of which OS X is based on.

    Comment by lom8104 on February 12th, 2006

  2. Ahh, thank you! That makes sense!

    Comment by debbieT on February 12th, 2006

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